They continued to talk; I, with my eyes fastened upon the fading shadow, sank into deep thought. Was that ship out there the vessel Tom and I and Will had boarded in the East India Docks? Was she the craft into whose black-hole under the forecastle I had crept, when all was silent in her prison ’tweendecks, while she lay at rest alongside the _Warrior_ hulk? Was she the theatre of the tragedy of the convicts’ uprisal, of their nightmare carousals? Was it yonder shadow fast blending with the gloom upon the waters, whose fabric had re-echoed the obscene songs, the blasphemous jokes, the insane yells of the self-freed felons? No more for a time than a wonderful horrible dream did it all seem to me as I stood looking--a frightful vision from which I must awaken and find myself in my bed at home, starting up to grieve and yearn for Tom as of old, and saying to myself: This dream came to me by thinking, before I fell asleep, of what his life would be on board the convict ship and how I was to make sure of joining him in the country he was transported to. The shadow vanished. It was the last we ever saw of the convict ship. It was the fittest of all disappearances for her. The folds of the morning darkness swallowed her up as though she had been thundered at headlong speed into the blackness of death’s dominions, whose obscurity was thickened yet by the vapours of the inextinguishable fires. I started, sighed, and passed my arm through Tom’s. At about eight o’clock this morning there was a lull in the wind; it then shifted suddenly into the south-east, blowing small at first, but freshening afterwards until it had settled into the steady pouring of the trade gale. I held the wheel while the three braced the yards forward, and soon the little brig was humming along on what sailors call a taut bowline with her fore and main royals set, and as fair a prospect of fine weather to windward as ever the noble commercial breeze of the South Atlantic painted in clouds and dyes of clear pure blue. This same morning, after breakfast, I still steering the little ship, Tom and the others overhauled the vessel afresh. They lifted the main-hatch and took a look below. They entered the lazarette, searched the fore-peak, closely again examined the crew’s sleeping-quarters. They met with everything essential in the equipment of a small brig--suits of sails, carpenter’s tools, boatswain’s stores in plenty. Indeed, Tom said she was the best found craft of her sort he had ever seen. He found a brace of pistols and ammunition for them in the captain’s cabin. There were no other small-arms on board.